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NCSoft announced today that it will be closing down Tabula Rasa on February 28th. The sci-fi shooter-flavored MMO struggled for quite some time, despite recent attempts to draw in new players by announcements of new features, price reductions, and using Richard Garriott's trip into space as a promotion. We discussed Garriott's departure from NCSoft a couple weeks ago. This is NCSoft's second failed MMO, and apparently layoffs are in the works. They seem to be making an effort to make the game's last few months as fun as they can for their remaining players, though. "Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009. We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while."

did somebody say "free"??? I like "free".:-) Alright. I'm new to online gaming. What do I need to play this game? Is dialup good enough or do I need broadband? Is the software downloadable?

According to TFA it will be free next year but it isn't yet. Yes, I'm fairly sure you'd need broadband. You can get the client here [playtr.com] but the installer is a few versions out-of-date and will need to download patches before you can play - you're looking at about 3.2GB all in.

Its not just spending the money... nor the company collapsing. Disney shut down their free MMO VMK for no apparently good reason except that they seemed to want to generate bad will among their customers. At least NCSoft is trying to "promote good will".

Its not just spending the money... nor the company collapsing. Disney shut down their free MMO VMK for no apparently good reason except that they seemed to want to generate bad will among their customers.

Yeah, battle.net and an mmo server have very, very little in common. The closest you get currently is FPS games where there server software comes with every copy of the game, some of which can host up to 64 players. That's hardly 'massively multiplayer' though.

At least with a MMO you pay far more over the months than for the original game; when they cut off service it saves you money. What does it matter if you play for a year or so then never really play it again or if they shut it down totally?

NCSoft isn't going under - far from it. TR was just not making them anywhere near enough money to keep it going. Not only that, but for people who stick with the game till the end, every player will get:

- 3 months free on City of Heroes- 3 months free on Lineage 2- beta access to Aion- a pre-order key for Aion- 1 month free and a paid-for client for Aion

Not a bad deal for 'wasting' 60 bucks on a failed MMO - a free game and about 100 dollars in free game time.

The difference between an MMO and a locked-down game is your expectation of value. When you buy a single-player (or small-scale multi-player) game, you are putting down your money to play the game whenever you want, and it's reasonable to expect those terms continue without being sabotaged. When you subscribe to an MMO, it's a completely different outlay. You're making a recurring payment to be part of a world that has hundreds or thousands of other people simultaneously interacting.

Single, no but small scale multiplayer with a player hosting? You could do 5-man, 10-man instances with friends and experience most of the PvE content that way. A lot of other things wouldn't be like WoW, but it would be a worthy stand-alone game I think. Obviously you can do all those things in the MMO, but I don't think you have to buy into the MMO aspect to enjoy WoW.

I see $19.99 for the software and an additional $14.99 per month. Sorry, but people bitch about OS X being $129 for an entire freaking operating system major upgrade but they want one to basically spring for $180 to have a year of on-line game playing?

Brilliant idea! That's right up with the $20 a month for email to chat with strangers on dating sites. Mankind finds amazing ways to piss money down the drain.

The game looks very cool and if they had a means of subsidizing it and making it so addictive tha

I got this game expecting an exciting alien warfare scifi reminiscent of Starship Troopers, that was what the ads sold me.

Once I started playing, though, what I found was that I landed in a planet filled with fantasy-like tribal race, with a "religous" thing about some magic like technology that I had the power to use... it was nothing but a fantasy game sold as a sci-fi one. THAT was the biggest issue with the game, that was what made me cancel the subscription just after 1 week. I even gave it a second chance and despite the few technological structures and mechs that were around, the entire thing still felt like a fantasy game. Heck, I'd go as far as granting the game 90% Fantasy/10%Sci-Fi on a box that spelled 100% neo-apocalyptic, human-alien warfare.

In short, it was like ordering a Burger and getting a Hotdog, may be a good hotdog, but I wanted a frigging burger.

As an avid "MMOer" I knew of and wanted to try this game. But with no free trial, I chose not to spend $50 to find out if I actually liked it or not, and I'm their target audience... The only reason I can think of that you _wouldn't_ want one on your game is you're trying to hide how horrid the game actually is. Makes sense I guess.

What they should do is allow players to download their character files, as well as sell the software to make 'private' servers. Now that would generate good will.

I was not interested in the game when it was released, nor a few months into live. It wasn't until about 3 months ago I was ready to try it, and could not anywhere find a free trial. Looks like I lucked out, since the game is folding anyway.

As an "avid" MMOer I can be cheap as I want to be, doesn't make me any less of one. The entire design of an MMO is perfect for free trials. The game is (in theory) never-ending, so allowing gamers to sample it for a week doesn't prevent sales, it promotes them. Unless of course like I proposed in my original post, the game is junk, and you want to hide it.

it got a lot of publicity on MMO Sites. I played it for a while, it looks cool, and there was some interesting story, but nothing too fancy. Something you'd pay $20 or $30 to play, but not something you would pay a subscription -- any amount -- for.

This is exactly why MMO's don't lend themselves well to keeping a historical imprint on society.
One part of what defines us is what we did for entertainment, but without a real hard copy of a game (be it CD, cartridge, etc.), the archaeologists of tomorrow will never know what time we REALLY wasted.
In fact that's one BIG problem with everything going to bits, everything needs electricity at some point to keep the records. One big EMF smackdown on the earth and its as if we never even existed past the ea

Firstly, I think you mean EMP not EMF. Secondly, EMP would have absolutely no impact on the bits that are stored on a hard drive platter, or a CD or DVD. Granted, those two forms of media won't last for thousand of years without severely degrading, but that property holds for paper also.

Our historic records are a scant fragment of what actually existed at one point, and imagine if the only pieces of entertainment we have today that can survive an archeologist digging them up in 50000 years would be a copy of ET for the Atari 2600 from the landfill out in the desert.

On the Ultima Online boards a few years ago, there was a discussion about player memorials (once a game has been around ten years, when a notable player passes away, it can have a real impact on the community - especially in a game where player houses can become landmarks). One of the arguments against player memorials was that there was no guarantee that the game would always be there, so it didn't seem the right place a true memorial.

One big EMF smackdown on the earth and its as if we never even existed past the early 2000's.

Well, much as I loved "Unbelievable," I don't think they're coming back, so we need not worry about that.

And anyway, do we really WANT to preserve the history of MMOs for future generations? They might see "LOLZ!!! N00BZ got pwned by agro horde!!!" and decide not to clone us back to life. Worse yet, they might emulate it.

From what I read of it and the little I saw it was trying to kinda be a sci-fi World of Warcraft. Ok... But the problem is World of Warcraft is really good. Blizzard really did a lot right in that game, things other games had failed miserably at (like having a very easy, engrossing introduction to the game). So if you are going to try and take on WoW, well you'd better be damn good. They weren't so there you go.

The MMOs other than WoW that seem successful are the ones that try and offer a real different gameplay experience. Something like Eve Online or Warhammer. They aren't trying to be WoW, they have their own idea of what a game should be. Now that may not get you 10 million players, but it can get you a comfortable niche. There are people who don't like WoW's way of doing things. If you make a game for them, you've got a good chance.

While I certainly think a game can compete with WoW, and we will see one at some point that does, it is going to have to be really good, and good out of the gate. WoW does a whole lot right and is generally very polished. So you've got to get all that down. If you don't, well then you are going to have people try your game and say "Eh, WoW was better,' and migrate back. Just changing the theme a bit or adding some bits won't help.

Personally what I want to see is an MMO that is really good that isn't trying to be WoW. I'd really like a more PvP oriented MMO. Warhammer has potential, but right now really lacks polish. I'd like to see an MMO that is as good as WoW, but in a different area. That is going to have a much easier time succeeding than something trying to take on the king.

I'm still waiting for an MMO that really feels like a living world. Where the quests I'm on are only mine: they haven't been done by anyone, and after me no one will do them again. A shared world, but the experience, the goals, and the journey are mine alone. When our paths cross, it isn't because we both clicked on the bright exclamation point over Quest Giver Cletus, but because our individual journeys have fallen in step for a time. And maybe I can develop my character not through killing and loot, but by making real moral decisions. Not the simplistic "Either take your reward (neutral), refuse the reward (good), or kill the guy and take the reward anyway (evil)" choices, but the ones that aren't very clear: Do you steal from the king, who you've sworn allegiance, in order to give some food to somebody who's starving? Do you kill one innocent child in order to save a village?

Not that I don't mind a little level grinding now and then. It's just that sometimes I want something with a little more meat to it.

Maybe someday I'll play a game that puts the "character" back in "character building".

For a lot of reasons not the least of which being such a thing would require a phenomenal amount of writing to be done to make all these unique quests and allow for all the branching. Hard enough to do something like that well in a single player game and in a huge multi player game, well it's near impossible. There's also technological hurdles to implementing such a thing.

At this point the closest you'll find to a game world you change is, again, in WoW. There are some quests that deal with a phased world. There are literally multiple versions of a given area and you experience the one relevant to your quest progression. So you do something and the world changes permanently because of it. However each person gets to do it. You are all in the same world, but there are multiple versions. Works pretty well.

At any rate the sort of thing you want isn't ever likely to come fully to fruition. You'd need something near a real artificial intelligence on the back end to deal with all this and a massive staff of writers and designers to try and implement this ever changing unique experience for millions of people.

With games you need to be satisfied to live in a small sandbox. There are going to be rules and boundaries of various kinds. That's part of what makes it interesting, fun, and doable. It is just like cards, you have to have a set of rules, limits on the deck and so on. If you just got people together and started drawing random shit on paper and trying to make a game you'd have the card game equivalent of Calvin Ball.

In terms of deep story and changing universe, you need to stick more to single player games, that's really the place it works. Play Mass Effect for a deep story, play WoW to kill night elves.

Don't think in a limited way/. Sure it's pretty unlikely that a company could actually get through the organizational red tape and god forbid the budgeting to pull of something of that scale, but that doesn't make it so improbable that it will never be done. Those are the real reason nothing of this nature has been accomplished. Money,getting a publisher to be patient enough for it to be developed, and the fact that no one wants to see someone else finish an awesome quest that they can't copy and reap the s

Actually yes, it does make it so improbable that it will never be done. The state of the art in computing isn't there yet for a computer to be able to create unique, contextual, meaningful or sensical quests on the fly. That means a human would have to do it, and for a human to be able to do this, unless these quests were so enormous as to take months, even seasons, to complete, you're looking at almost a 1:1 ratio of players to game master/developers.

Well, I've been thinking on one way around this, and while I should save it and make a bazillion dollars off the idea, here it is:

In many MMOs, the quest items are ethereal - you kill stuff and get things, but you never actually have those items on your person - the quest keeps track, and when you get them all, it goes "ding" and you turn it in for a reward. You don't actually tote around 15 horns of some beast, hides, etc.

Make those items easier to get, real, but encumbering, and allow them to be traded. And make it so that at lower levels killing the things would be good XP, but at the level you get the quest they aren't very good XP. At first glance this seems like a stupid idea, but....

The beauty is that there's a good chance you will ask someone lower level to go do your dirty work for you. You'll pay them for the goods, they'll get XP and gold, you'll turn in the quest. Thus, rather than you getting quests from NPCs, you'll get them from PCs. "Damn - that 37th level fighter just came by and offered to pay me a ton of gold to go kill swamp rats, if I bring him the tails. I guess some wizard he knows needs them."

That is far more interesting than going to the tavern master six times in a row, or bouncing from NPC to NPC in town to get and turn in quests. The strength of a MMO is that there are lots of people playing. Make them part of the world, rather than "just another player".

When the 57th level wizard rounds up the n00bs and has them party up to go hunting grass snakes for him, that will make the game far more engaging and interesting. If each one of those n00bs was hunting them for the alchemist next to the baker, it would be far less engaging and interesting.

In many MMOs, the quest items are ethereal - you kill stuff and get things, but you never actually have those items on your person - the quest keeps track, and when you get them all, it goes "ding" and you turn it in for a reward. You don't actually tote around 15 horns of some beast, hides, etc.

You haven't played Everquest. The reason the new games don't do this is players are whining retards.

1) "I accidently deleted my quest items/ sold them to a vendor/ dropped them on the ground" wah wah....

To be fair, most people play these games for diversion. So, they tend to want to get into the fun quickly. Being able to head to the auction house and then fly to my destination is easier than traveling for an hour or more to the accepted trading location and bartering with people.

Why -bother- with the auction house at all? That's sort of my point. As a game mechanic its fundamentally FLAWED. Its there to appease the players that don't actually want to trade, that want that whole part of the game reduced to

It depends on what the goal of the mechanic is. In the case of WoW, it streamlines the experience and lets people get to the "fun parts" of building up a character faster. So, in this instance, it's actually a rousing success. You're arguing that it takes away something that you value: the feeling of a living world. But I don't think that goal, as you would define it, was ever an intention of WoW. Therefore, you can't say the auction houses are fundamentally flawed as the apply to WoW.

The trouble, or perhaps the beauty of WoW, is that they cater to a (massive) player base who really just want to "kill stuff and get loot" and -anything- that slows down either they want removed or mitigated.

Exactly. And, know what? A lot of old-school MMO game players heralded that as a success. It gets people to the "fun parts" of the game. It doesn't make the game feel like "a grind". People have welcomed this with open arms. WoW has, by far, the largest subscriber base in North America of any game; the masses have spoken, and they like that type of game. (Not to downplay the market power of the "Blizzard" and "Warcraft" names, though, since those helped a lot.)

Unfortunately, the grim business reality is that most projects are going to want to aim for this market. Back when EQ1 was the king of the roost, people wanted MMO projects to be "more like EverQuest!" Now that WoW is top of the heap in terms of subscribers, people want that. Especially the people funding these projects, because they want to make what Blizzard is making off of WoW. That means things like having what feels like a "living world" is not usually a concern for MMO game developers, specially the ones getting big funding from game companies.

Eve proves that niche games can be successful

EVE proves nothing of the sort. EVE was a commercial failure when it launched, the publisher dropped the project quickly after launch. For most companies, this would have been death. CCP, the developers of EVE, got funding from the goverment of Iceland, and thus were able to re-acquire the rights to the game and stay in business. EVE was able to stick with development and enjoy some modest success for being a game that didn't try to directly copy EQ or WoW. But, it took a pretty special set of circumstances for the game to survive and thrive. A lot of niche games aren't so lucky.

This is why I made a big deal about people having to accept that a niche game isn't going to be as large, high quality, and/or as cheap as mainstream games. WoW is like McDonalds: it serves millions and millions, but it's not the best food you'll ever eat. If you want something more healthy and tasty, you aren't going to be able to only spend 99 cents for your hamburger; likewise, if you want something that isn't built to cater to the largest market possible, get ready to have to accept some compromises.

It depends on what the goal of the mechanic is. In the case of WoW, it streamlines the experience and lets people get to the "fun parts" of building up a character faster.

Precisely. It streamlines away part of the game the majority of the players don't want to play. Why not just finish the job, and streamline it right out of the game? Its not like anyone actually enjoys sitting there using the auction house. Its just a "housekeeping" chore that they attend to. It still takes time away from doing the "fun pa

"Where the quests I'm on are only mine: they haven't been done by anyone, and after me no one will do them again."

For WoW, that would be over 10 million accounts with on average 3-4 characters each. Each of those characters needs to have unique quests to get them from 1-80 (for now). That is an INSANE amount of work. Especially considering that you only have so much room for NPCs and mobs.

I think if you really want to do that the players have to interact more, and in more varied ways than a current MMO. You'd want players occupying roles usually held by NPCs, you'd want to have players be able to generate quests and you'd want to have players build up or tear down towns outside the core few provided by the game.

I think Ultima Online was closer to providing that experience than WoW has been -- player owned towns were not uncommon and early on it was a constant battle with the forces of chao

If that's what you're looking for, sign up for eve, spend 3 months skilling up and learning the basics (go for Amarr), and then leave the sections of space controlled by NPC's. Go get involved in alliance politics. It's not "only you" doing missions, but if you join up with one of the player controlled alliances in 0.0 space, it's your alliance deciding their destiny - taking over other people's space, staging raids on their resource-gathering operations, defending your corner of the universe. It's reall

I'm still waiting for an MMO that really feels like a living world. Where the quests I'm on are only mine: they haven't been done by anyone, and after me no one will do them again. A shared world, but the experience, the goals, and the journey are mine alone. When our paths cross, it isn't because we both clicked on the bright exclamation point over Quest Giver Cletus, but because our individual journeys have fallen in step for a time. And maybe I can develop my character not through killing and loot, but by making real moral decisions. Not the simplistic "Either take your reward (neutral), refuse the reward (good), or kill the guy and take the reward anyway (evil)" choices, but the ones that aren't very clear: Do you steal from the king, who you've sworn allegiance, in order to give some food to somebody who's starving? Do you kill one innocent child in order to save a village?

Not that I don't mind a little level grinding now and then. It's just that sometimes I want something with a little more meat to it.

Maybe someday I'll play a game that puts the "character" back in "character building".

You're looking for a pencil & paper RPG, in an MMO. Sure, it can and likely will be done.. in time.

It won't require a huge team of content writers, constantly creating new quests and such. There's no way a company would put it together under those conditions. The only way it would truly succeed, is when the server is capable of functioning as a GM. Really, really in depth AI will be required.

Its just not going to happen until the computer can do it without constant developer input. Nobody(almost nobody,

Why do you need the "M" or the "O"? You will never, ever, see what you want in an MMO because A) no one will develop a detailed, nuanced game intended for mass online interaction and then B) only let you play it.

If you want to be the only one to do the quest, ever, why not play an offline game? Then you are the only hero. Or, better yet, if you want a game where you can make any level of nuanced decision and have the world reflect appropriately, and you still want to interact with some other people, why

If you want an individualized experience with complex moral dilemmas, plus a long-term story, you simply cannot deliver that inside of a Massive game. Can't be done.

If you want quests that have never been done before, will never be done again, yet still integrate with a long-term plot, affect your character for a long time, and involve real moral decisions, you are simply looking in the wrong place. What you are asking for requires the services of a living, breathing G

Surely it wouldn't be easy, but you're just a stick in the mud. You could do this. The first step would be having a system without explicit questgivers, just goals that AI entities and the player characters must fulfill to survive -- IE, not getting too hot and burning to death, not getting too cold and dying of hypothermia, not running out of food to eat daily, etc.

Now quests are "unique" not in the sense that nobody has done what you've done before (stealing food from an NPC king to feed a dying NPC orpha

Now just throw in the option for "hardcore" servers which don't allow player characters to respawn, and allow open PVP, and I think you've got a game that would appeal to ye olde hardcore tabletop RPG crowd. It'd be truly immersive if any actor in the simulation could die permanently, either to a sword in the belly or just from the lack of an adequate food supply.

Making player created content work isn't the problem. It's keeping all the asshats away from it that create PR/legal nightmares for your game. I was really surprised that Pirates of the Burning Sea let players upload their own pics for sails on their ships. I did expect to see more people flying under the banner of goatse. But the developers approve all the artwork. Kudos to them. It's a REALLY fun aspect to the game. Policing custom quests and other more hefty player-driven content would probably be a bit

It IS that surprising.Garriott is a veteran, the whole Ultima Franchise, not to mention UO (more or less) started the whole (grahpical) MMO thing. To have created an epic fail like Tabula Rasa, is surprising.

And, I'll say for the record, WoW is not the first to be designed like it is. WoW itself was trying to be so many other RPGs, and MMOs before it (but better.) WoW was fantastic, even though I'm highly critical of the endgame.

The flipside of that is EVERY MMO is trying to be as successful as WoW. To y

"Garriott is a veteran, the whole Ultima Franchise, not to mention UO (more or less) started the whole (grahpical) MMO thing. To have created an epic fail like Tabula Rasa, is surprising."

Garriott was out of his element, he hasn't really designed games (been in the trenches) for years, he should have stuck to fantasy I knew his sci-fi work was doomed from the moment I heard it. Few companies can do sci-fi, and even then their success is moderate.

It's interesting you mention Warhammer and Eve, when WoW's biggest competition (by far) is actually... Runescape.Blizzard toots it's horn about having 10+ million players, but Jagex hit that number back in 2007, and in 2008, an estimate was placed that the current RS community is over 16 million players.

Unlike in WoW, RS is extremely difficult to make a powerful avatar (Less than 100 players have reached max level), the game almost encourages individualistic gameplay, the graphics are unimpressive, and play

I actually played it, and it was significantly different from WoW. The most obvious difference was the combat mechanism - it was rigged up like a first person shooter. You had targetting reticle, and you aimed at the enemy, and pulled the trigger to fire off bursts. It didn't have the usual timed-swing mechanism of most MMOs. It felt very dynamic. There were your usual RPG "dice"-rolls behind the scenes, but it felt very shooterish. There were some other differences, like the class tree, item creation mecha

This is a shame; TR had a lot of potential to be more than just another shooty take on MMOs. Ancient mysteries, xeno-archaeology, a strong theme of religion and myth, a dramatic war.... It could have been a lot more. Instead it was pretty bland at times. They had a lot of great ideas but they never seemed to implement them in time or well enough.

I was in the closed beta, and I really really wanted to like this game. The music was cool, the settings were fantastic, the scaling was pretty nicely done, and it was open to the casual gamer... but it was flawed. It just didn't grab a person.

As I said, it's really a shame. It could have been a lot more. Oh, well. I hope they learned something from it's failure. I just hope that 'Worlds of Starcraft' doesn't waltz in and take over the SciFi MMO slot.

I really thought TR had potential. It's true that the launch was a little rocky and it was rough around the edges but as you really progressed through the game, the story was actually rather compelling.

I had some misgivings about the limited character creation system where is was basically a cookie cutter system where you could only change the face as a whole, hair, skin color and a couple accessories; as well as the clunky and convoluted crafting system that they took way too long to fix. I think they re

Back in 1997, I was playing a character on the old TrekMoo, when the Q (the admins) were in the process of moving to new servers. They decided to all scorched universe on the remaining players and I have to say, that was a heck of lot of fun. The Borg invaded, the Romulans and Klingons got their ass kicked and we intrepid few in the federation were forced to make some tough choices that included sacrificing our ship. It was a small community of text based adventurers, but the collaborative effort made it a hell of a lot of fun.

I'm surprised there aren't more scorched earth games, where we build up communities just to have them torn down. I hope the loyal players of playing Tabula Rasa get to have the same kind of experience. I know it influenced me as to what good collaborative theaterical improvisation was all about.

Blizzard tried something like this with the most recent world event to usher in the new expansion. Player controlled zombies rampant everywhere, infecting other players and NPCs alike. In the end, half of the players enjoyed it. The other half brought some *serious* whining, complaining that they "couldn't get stuff done". Can't please everyone, I guess.

Well with the number of people playing the game and the availability of official forums for people to have their verbal diarrhea on it's no surprise. I will say though having the world event spill out into areas where people who potentially don't even have the higher level characters capable of taking advantage of the new stuff in the expansion is just going to tick them off for really nothing in return can get irritating. There's nothing dumber than getting ganked by a level 70 zombie in the Crossroads o

I would like to see this apply more to a long term strategy for an MMO.

MMO != Never ending questing.

An MMO could be more meaningful if the game actually had epic stories, that had real goals and real conclusions. Establish story lines as if it was a science fiction or fantasy series, where player actions are permanently etched into future stories / histories. Hire some permanent story writers, and develop an ongoing dialogue between them and the players, making player actions meaningful.

I'm sure other posters will mention Tabula Rasa's bugs, lousy control scheme, poor class balance, etc (typical MMO grievances) but to me the thing that always stood out about TR was its abysmal support for building communities.

Everyone's abuzz about Web 2.0 and "social networking," and somehow the TR devs didn't even see fit to have a Looking For Group feature in the game. The had on-line chat and a Friends list, and that's about it. The thing about massively MULTIPLAYER games is that they are only as good as the people you play with. Sure, a small percentage of MMO players exclusively solo, but for most people, the solo experience is basically a laggy, slightly glitchy single-player game, with extra monotonous grinding. In other words, you get bored of it after a month or two, max, just like any other single player game.

"Players come for the game, but stay for the community." -- I forget who said it, but that sums up most MMOs today. Compared to single-player games, any MMO is mediocre at best. The only reason people will pay $15/month for the MMO is to play with their friends. Tabula Rasa made it very difficult for me to locate people I might want to team with, let alone befriend. There was more incentive to solo than to assemble PUGs.

Suggestion to future MMO designers: Find a way to match up players with other players of similar game-play styles and compatible personalities. No, I'm not talking about in-game romance, just helping people find a good team. Match up Leeroy Jenkins with other Leeroy Jenkins, etc. Stop thinking of the players as an audience looking for "content." They're not. They're looking to hang out with friends and kill monsters.

I like your observation that community is the key ingredient that gives an MMO longevity. It makes me wonder if an open-source MMO might one day not only rival the current big commercial ones, but even become far more long lived than any of them because its community would last forever, and it could never get shut down, regardless of perceived success or failure.

The easy attack on that idea is simply that "server farms cost a ton of money", but MMOs don't have to be programmed to require centralized server

..requirements being not much different to those of an IRC server..You've may have never run a popular IRC host then. It's not the bandwidth so much but the damn DDOS that will kill you. I had a popular IRC box back in 2000 or so and it took a 400MB/s DDOS hit. My boss sure didn't like that on his network!

and who will donate the incredible amount of high quality artwork in all forms required to make a good MMO? and not only do you need lots of high quality artwork, it also needs to be done along the same style and theme, and be artistically consistent. the people that have the skills and talent to make art for are an MMO are usually too busy with their dayjob.

Exactly you can't just slap together a bunch of components like you can with a kernel or compiler. Some projects only need a lead architect to wrangle developers and enforce some quality control. But games generally need a series of directors beyond the programming. There are many interdependent groups that can not easily move forward independently. Client, Server, UI, modelers, level designers, 2d artwork, audio, I'm sure the list goes on.

It makes me wonder if an open-source MMO might one day not only rival the current big commercial ones, but even become far more long lived than any of them because its community would last forever, and it could never get shut down, regardless of perceived success or failure.

In a word: No. This has been tried many times before. Perhaps the most notable project has been WorldForge (http://worldforge.org/).

For a bit of background, I've been developing MMO games professionally for over a decade, and did text

My pleasure. I enjoy a good discussion about an area I'm pretty passionate about.

Let me give you a concrete counter-example to what you suggest is a fundamental problem.

I don't know much about Cube/Sauerbraten, so I can't comment on it directly. I will say that it's nowhere near as complex as an MMO. The game boasts 7 weapons, whereas Meridian 59, which is hardly the largest game, has 13 melee weapons, 4 ranged weapons, and over 150 individual spells that all ha

Has anyone played Tabula Rasa ? I've only heard of it, mostly due to Richard Garriott's involvement, but I don't know any players. From reading the write-ups, it sounds a lot like Sony's PlanetSide, with some anime RPG elements bolted on.

PlanetSide never really got big enough, so there wasn't enough action to keep things interesting. There's really no fun in being the only guy on the continent, capping base after base without resistance.

I started playing PlanetSide during the open stress testing. I loved that game. I bought it the day it was available at the local EBGames. The game was simple: kill the other guys and take their territory. It was like this until WoW's open beta, then something happened...

They started adding crazy crap: now certain bases couldn't be captured just by taking them over, you had to grab a football (LIU I think they tried to call them?) and take it back to another base you controlled. Oh wait, look at that, you'r

I extensively beta tested Tabula Rasa, but in the end did not buy the release version based on the experience. It's a classic example of an interesting idea rushed out the door before it was finished.

The classes were poorly differentiated, and in most cases the base skills were better to use than the later specialized skills. So most classes spammed basic attacks. Probably one of the worst games I've played as far as polishing classes goes.

First, I was supposed to beta test it. The installer kept giving me a weird error about a FIPS cryptographic package. I was never able to install it. The NCSoft Support team didn't seem to have a clue as to how to solve the problem and install the game. If anyone deserves to be sued, it's NCSoft. People bought TR with the expectation that it would be an on-going experience. It is now shutting down. The value that was expect is no longer.

So let me get this straight... As an MMO operator you only do the 'really fun things' once you are going out of business?

Because, I guess it wouldn't make sense to have been doing those from day one. You know, to stay in business?

Seriously, I played TR. I enjoyed it immensely during the first half of the game. Then it got incredibly repetitive and boring. The crafting and economy were simply not good enough. End-game activities were not good enough. In today's world, those are two make-it or break-it

I knew that suggestion was going to pop up within the first twenty posts. Beyond the technical reasons for not bothering, there are plenty of legal ones too. Just ask any of NCSoft's shareholders, or the management hierarchy that would have to reach consensus in order to release the code. This isn't just a matter of one person's pet project, or a small company folding.

And before anyone points Quake out, recall how long it took for them to release the source, and also recall that the release included none

This seems to fit with both the Google and the yahoo business model. Take your pick.

The successful RPG has to give a player a significant and entertaining role to play in a world that invites and rewards deep exploration. Tech isn't as important as art and story. That is a very different universe than the one inhabited by Yahoo and Google.

I read an interesting article about how, in the past 3 years, there have been just shy of 80 million home gaming consoles (not handheld). Do you know how many GAMING PCs were sold? Not the crappy HP boxes you have at work, mind you, but real GAMING PCs?

It WAS a lot of fun. It just couldn't shake the stigma attached to it when it went through the public beta. The game had VASTLY improved throughout the year. They resolved many of the issues people had with the game. It is sad really.

"It WAS a lot of fun. It just couldn't shake the stigma attached to it when it went through the public beta. The game had VASTLY improved throughout the year. They resolved many of the issues people had with the game. It is sad really."

Why is it sad? Why should customers expect to pay on launch for a product that isn't ready? I really hate that about the software industry, from a design and engineering perspective, the software industry still sucks at designing things.

Yes, it looks like a great game, actually. I would probably have played it, too. Would I have been upset with bugs, yes, but the genre of the game is what I like. In truth, there are so many games that it's hard to know what is out there at any one time.

So my question is, if the game has improved drastically, why are they making it free for the last month, if only to say to all the new players, "Ha! we told you it would be worth it" ??

It may be fun now, but when a public beta is one dimensional and boring, this is what happens. And that summed up Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Considering that the last few Origin games weren't that great (it peaked at 3-5), Garriott had lost his fastball.

MMOs are really about how good a game is at launch. The more bugs and poor gameplay there is, the worse the game will do. And it's hard to recover for a lackluster launch and first few months. Let's look at some examples.

City of Heroes had one of the cleanest launches of an MMO that I've ever seen. Almost no bugs, and for the first 20-30 levels, you don't really pay too much attention to how monotonous the game really is. Then the monotony gets to you, and players pushed through it. Personally, I think it was the costumes that made this game playable beyond those first 20 levels or so, as the costume generator is second to none. But the number of players dropped quicly after launch, because of that monotony. You can only go through so many "caves" or similar looking "installations" before you're done.

EQ2 launched, and the game was specifically designed to be just as hard as EQ, but with better graphics. There were a lot of interesting aspects to the game, but the #1 drawback is that you didn't play your real class until you hit lvl 20! You started off as a generic fighter/mage/healer/thief, and at lvl 10, you refined it down a little more, and at lvl 20 you finally gained your ultimate class. Well, nobody liked that part. While it was launched a week or two before WoW, EQ2 suffered for that initial stupidty. In many ways, EQ2 now is a better game than WoW is today, with a lot less downtime, a heck of a lot better with new content, and a more mature player base. But it is doubtful that it will ever recover from the blah launch it had. Maybe if Blizzard destroys WoW with some stupid expansion, EQ2 will explode, minues the PvP crowd.

WoW launched after a pretty positive closed and open beta. And unless you were on one of the original "terrible 20" servers (I was on one), the game wasn't too bad. Sure, they took about 6 months to stop having the same exact problem after EACH update, but the game has a genuine "fun factor" to it that didn't wear off until you hit level cap, unless you enjoyed PvP. Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes, but what they didn't screw up was making the game flat out fun. There's a reason they have over 10 million subscribers world wide: it's fun to play. It will remain to be seen if Blizzard's continual push for more Arena style PvP starts to piss the player base off, but it's hard to get a large group of friends to switch games, and WoW has most of them hooked deep. The only things that will be a WoW-killer are Blizzard and time.

LotRO was a pretty poor beta experience. When one class is completely dominant over all others, the game has problems. The primary healer class was also the best offensive spellcaster in the game. A group of 4 of them could handle pretty much all content easily in the early stages, leaving a poor taste in the player's mouth. It's not surprising that with all the history and the success of the LotR movies, the game saw decent numbers at launch. They didn't last very long.

AoC was a disasterous beta, in the fact that the open beta only let you experience the first 20 levels, which happened to contain the only fun part of the game. Look at it now. It's going to be the next game to shut down their servers. I'd guestimate that over 75% of the players that bought the game for launch left within 2 months. That's a staggering number.

Warhammer Online might make a decent dent in the market. For all the delays and the removal of content prior to launch, the game was actually a hell of a lot of fun in beta. I hate PvP for the most part, and even I enjoyed my beta experience a lot. I believe the game is doing well so far, from what friends are saying. The game didn't get a lot of good hype based on it's name alone, so the hype was all about the gameplay itself. This one could have staying power.

We won't even get into SW:G and everything that went wrong with that game. We'll just cross that one off as a colossal mistake.

Warhammer Online I would have to say will fall into your COH assessment. I played it up to level 26 and got bored and tired of the RVR content. It was repetitive and always the same. People were/are stupid and never worked together (on both sides.) Every match pretty much was the same, with the same tactics, and the same look. It was worse than sewers and buildings in COH. At least they changed layout in COH.

Now, you take that formula and make end game out of that? No thanks! I was sick and tired of the game when I hit level 20 without playing RVR and had to go to the other areas and complete partial chapters just to level. Then I found out RVR experience was a pretty huge part of the game and I started RVR'ing more. Then the boring repetitive run Morkain's Temple (sp?) over and over and over again until you got sick of it.

Granted, I'm not a fan of PVP/RVR content. I think it inspires all the wrong in people and they become competitive rather than cooperative. The type of people that play PVP games are generally less inclined to help other people. Nowhere better did this show than in Public quests. It wasn't about helping people complete it. It was about who could heal/damage/tag/collect more than everyone else. Then you toss in the random loot roller and you had a situation like I had with my friends. You see that a PQ was near completion, you'd jump in and get a few shots to have the opportunity just to get loot and out roll the players that had been there progressing the quest from the start.

Games like these make me absolutely hate PVP. Not because of all the good things that COULD come from it... but because of all the bad that DOES.

But here's what I think: It's just a last ditch effort to generate buzz and customers. If they get a significant increase in players, down the line there may be an announcement that the death is being put off. Then, a bit later there will be value added content for a fee. If things really pick up, they can make it all pay-for-play. Or, if nothing happens, it dies on cue.

The population seems to be declining in both factions, and the developer seems more concerned with gimmicky special events than fixing some serious issues with the gameplay, interface, and faction balance. Not to mention long CSR response times

The date of release doesn't help much either, alot of people played for a month then went on the Wrath of the Lich King.